July 30, 2015  Some of the most breathtaking views in the Universe are created by nebulae -- hot, glowing clouds of gas. This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the center of ... read more

July 23, 2015  NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small ... read more

July 23, 2015  Using archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray telescopes, astronomers have discovered a gigantic black hole, which is probably ... read more

July 16, 2015  The Gaia satellite has discovered a unique binary system where one star is 'eating' the other, but neither star has any hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe. The system could ... read more

July 15, 2015  Sibling suns -- made famous in the "Star Wars" scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset -- and the planets around them may be more common than we've thought, and ... read more

July 15, 2015  So far, exoplanet surveys have been most sensitive to planetary systems that are populated in their inner regions by massive planets, down to a few times the mass of the Earth. This contrasts with ... read more

July 9, 2015  The ghostly shells of galaxy ESO 381-12 are captured in a new image, set against a backdrop of distant galaxies. The strikingly uneven structure and the clusters of stars that orbit around the galaxy ... read more

July 8, 2015  Observations have for the first time demonstrated a link between a very long-lasting burst of gamma rays and an unusually bright supernova explosion. The results show that the supernova was not ... read more

July 7, 2015  Almost 2000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, ranging from rocky Earth-like planets to hot-Jupiters, and orbiting every type of star. But how many of these distant worlds are habitable? ... read more

July 5, 2015  A team of astronomers announced the discovery of a ring of rocks circling a very young star. This is the first time these 'pebbles', thought to be a crucial link in building planets, have ... read more

July 1, 2015  Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a young giant gas planet still embedded in the midst of the disk of gas and dust surrounding its parent star. For the first time, scientists are able to ... read more

July 1, 2015  This rich view of an array of colorful stars and gas was captured by the Wide Field Imager camera, on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. It shows a young ... read more

June 30, 2015  Type Ia supernovae are the 'standard candles' astrophysicists use to chart distance in the Universe. But are these dazzling exploding stars truly all the same? To answer this, scientists ... read more

June 29, 2015  33 Kepler stars have been selected for their solar like oscillations and a set of basic parameters have been determined with high precision showing that stars even older than 11 billion years have ... read more

June 29, 2015  Astronomers have created all-sky image maps and released the full database to researchers. Far-infrared light is the key wavelength range for investigating the formation processes of stars and ... read more

June 26, 2015  New work offers a potential solution to a longstanding problem in the prevailing theory of how rocky planets formed in our own Solar System, as well as in others. The snag he's untangling: how ... read more

June 25, 2015  The giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has swallowed an entire medium-sized galaxy over the last billion years. For the first time a team of astronomers has been able to track the motions of 300 ... read more

June 24, 2015  Astronomers have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dispersing from a warm, Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous comet-like tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of ... read more

June 23, 2015  In late 2013, when the neutron star at the heart of one of our galaxy's oddest supernovae gave off a massive burst of X-rays, the resulting echoes -- created when the X-rays bounced off clouds ... read more